East African industrial metal, head-popping techno, walloping bassline, filthy jungle, improvised minimalism and experimental pop. With DJ sets, gigs, art installations and exhibitions stretched across Sheffield and Rotherham, this year’s No Bounds festival feels, and sounds, weightier than ever.
It begins in Sheffield Cathedral, where 10-piece Emergence Collective stir things to life with a beautifully subtle yet hypnotic performance of stripped back instrumental minimalism. Tara Clerkin Trio offer up an incredibly sparse, slightly woozy, yet quietly groove-locked set, with both acts thoughtfully leaning into the vast space, allowing silences and pauses to ring out.
Later, in the pounding darkness of Hope Works – the festival’s main hub in a former gun barrel factory in deepest industrial Sheffield – subtlety and restraint are of less interest to Kenyan techno-metaller Lord Spikeheart, whose set is an assault of guttural screams and pulverising beats, before Sheffield’s own grime MC Coco puts on a masterclass of dizzying flow.
The range of daytime activities is impressive, from projected artwork responding in real time to the River Don, to sonic experiments with lucid dreaming and musical archive explorations spanning pirate radio and the miners’ strikes. Back at Hope Works in the evening, re:ni delivers a slick yet ever-shifting set of bass-heavy club hitters before Batu riotously runs the gamut from searing techno to R&B at a volume so intense you have to check your organs are still intact once it’s over.
Now in its seventh edition, No Bounds already had the party element of the festival locked down, and it remains a buzzy, buoyant and characterful place to let rip until the sun comes up. But it feels like a festival that’s swiftly evolving: its ability to factor the physical environment into its programming – from DIY venues to African-Caribbean community centres via castles, cathedrals, chapels and galleries – combined with its mushrooming arts offerings and increasingly genre-fluid lineup results in its most varied and expansive offering to date.
